Ciprico Rimfire 3200

The first Sun3 servers weren't equipped with SCSI disks.
In these days SMD disk were state of the art. Sun used
the Xylogics 451 which sat on a Multibus-VME-Bus adapter.
This beast (brand ttl grave) was dumb and slow.
Later sun sold the Xylogics 753 (or 7053), which is much
better.

People who needed fast disks early in 1986 had to look for
third party disk controllers. Ciprico made the Rimfire 3200
which could serve four SMD drives and later the 3400 which
could serve four ESDI disks.

The Rimfire does have 512 kB cache, can use DMA and all
I/O operations are done via shared memory. This makes it
much faster than the Xylogics 451 and even the Xylogics
7053 isn't any faster.

To be able to boot from the Rimfire the machine needs
special boot ROMs.
Later versions had an Xylogics XY451 emulation so they
didn't need such tricks. But these Rimfire make more
trouble when used with the rf driver.

I've packed all software (drivers, format-utility, boot sectors)
and Usenet artices together that i have for the Rimfire and made
it available for download here.